Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with historian Elisabeth Engel, to speak about her experience writing her first book, Encountering Empire, on the lives of African American Missionaries in colonial Africa during the early twentieth century, and her thoughts on the subject since the monograph was published.

Today, just a few days before Christmas, we hear from journalist and writer Alex Palmer about how an early twentieth century New Yorker (his great grand-uncle) invented the popular, contemporary American fixtures of the Christian holiday. Gotham 's interview with the bestselling author of The Santa Claus Man follows.

This is another installment of FootNotes, a regular series of conversations with authors of recent works of NYC history. Today’s interview is with Alice Elliott, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, about her new documentary Miracle on 42nd Street. This interview was conducted by Adam Tanaka, a PhD candidate in urban planning at Harvard whose research focuses on affordable housing. Tanaka is currently working on a documentary about Co-op City in the Bronx.

Today on Gotham, historian Mason B. Williams interviews Shannon King ​about his new book Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

Few, if any, New York neighborhoods have been studied as intensively as Harlem, and no period in Harlem’s history has received as much attention as the Roaring Twenties. In his debut book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, the historian Shannon King shows us a less familiar, yet more representative and perhaps ultimately more telling, side of interwar Harlem. In place of the tales of towering intellectuals, brilliant artists (and their canny boosters), and “the making of a ghetto,” King shines a light on the grassroots struggles — with police, landlords, and employers — which collectively “comprised the fulcrum of Harlem’s political culture” and paved the way for the remarkable upsurge of protest politics of the 1930s and 1940s. An associate professor of history at the College of Wooster, King is also a native New Yorker, raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. A Scholars-in-Residence fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture allowed him to return to Harlem to conduct research for Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Our conversation touched upon the usefulness of the concept of “community rights” in thinking about the Black freedom struggle in the interwar North; the role of gender in shaping grassroots activism; and King’s brilliant analysis of the effect of Prohibition on Harlem’s community politics. Ultimately, King says, he wanted to give the people who waged struggles for justice in 1920s Harlem the recognition they deserved. There is no question that he has done that. And in recasting those struggles as part of a campaign for community rights, he has filled in a crucial part of the history of Black politics, both in New York and beyond. — Mason Williams

Today marks the debut of FootNotes, a regular series of conversations with authors of recent works of New York history conducted by the historian Mason B. Williams. For the first installment, or interviewer spoke with Robert W. Snyder about his new book Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City, the subject of The Gotham Center's December 10th event.